“…to be a citizen has come to mean something else, it means to be an outsider….the relation itself [between people] is on its last legs inasmuch as they do not essentially relate to each other in the relation, but the relation itself has become a problem in which the parties like rivals in a game watch each other instead of relating to each other, and count, as it is said, each other’s verbal avowals of relation as a substitute for resolute mutual giving in the relation.”

Soren Kierkegaard, “Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age – A Literary Review.” March 30, 1864.

The rise of the worst kind of identity politics,[1] motivated by group-think, is not a shocking development, given the confluence of Marxist ideology in the social sciences, the pervasion of postmodern philosophy in everything from film to literature, from religion to the concepts of truth and the good, and, finally, the apparent powerlessness of the populace to effect change against known immanent crises like global warming, overpopulation, income inequality, and the like. Most in the electorate feel impotent, considering there seems no route to rouse career politicians to vote on something that doesn’t, in the end, contribute to the lining of their suits or the thickening of party lines. It is the youngest groups that receive the largest blow. So social change must be manufactured. On the most general level of analysis, doesn’t it make intuitive sense that social change can be achieved by sheer numbers, and that the outcomes we desire must be taken, and cannot be given, from the present order?

What may be more surprising to some readers is this development, though with seemingly benevolent intentions,[2] ultimately reflects the direction of history set in motion around the time of the Greeks: nihilism. As an equalizing force, flattening all idiosyncrasies to simple, sanitized ideological order, nihilism is the characteristic movement of thought underlying our age. The list of prophets proclaiming this coming order reaches back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, though they are by no means the only two. Both attempted to overcome nihilism by appealing to the individual. This last fortress they recovered by reaching backwards in history and deep into the inner workings of language, for the fossils of this concept date to vestigial conceptions of the world as understood by religion.[3]

The nihilism manifested in our secular age finds the Savior not in a God-man incarnate, which signified within Christianity the importance of the individual, but finds the savior of humankind in group power and identification. By replacing the near-infinite complexity of individual personhood with one or two group-based traits, identity politics, in its most extreme forms, aims at both the loss of individual liberty for group directives and the annihilation of individual identity for group belonging. This is a problem. As the religiously affiliated vanish, it is no accident that group-power fills the void religion leaves behind, for the power of suffering is still evident to all. And it is no accident violent protests at universities against free speech, and no-platforming against scientists and conservative speakers, have become commonplace, for the social sciences have told us we can change anything when we work together. The question remains whether by sheer willpower we can change the the realities science reveals in its methods. Although some higher education institutions are stepping up to the challenges these recent developments pose, others have capitulated. It appears even Google has deferred to the ideological order when challenged with scientific viewpoints.[4] Why? Listen to any of the multitude of protests, conducted by so called “Social Justice Warriors,”[5] filmed and uploaded on YouTube typically by the protestors themselves.[6] You’ll find a harrowing reality, where no evidence is given for assertions, virtue-signalling is the only virtue, and logic and reason are received from opposing parties as weapons of violence. In fact, speech itself is understood as violence.[7] This is a strange new world, yet hardly brave. We should be wary of the attempts of identity politics to place our value as persons in the attainment of group traits, in the assertion that mere belonging to a group bestows epistemic or moral superiority. We should be wary, that is to say, of any wisdom we haven’t earned.[8]

The observant viewer might suspect postmodernists are playing an old game, and I think this suspicion is mostly correct. As nihilism flattens the dimensions of selfhood, identity-politics has made us forget our history, while dooming us to repeat it. We must not forget the power of ideology that ruled the centuries before the Enlightenment during which religious violence ravaged Europe, and we must not take for granted the miraculous gift of rationality that followed. The rise of scientific rationality displaced the more primitive strains of religious logic as the speech in which disparate systems of beliefs may come together to debate, change, and compromise.[9] All the same, the gift is never guaranteed. Postmodernists may mean well, but if they cannot dialogue with those who oppose them they simply replay this scene from history, except in reverse. This time it is the abstract language of science that has written the creeds, and the social sciences that play the role of Inquisitors. The language which emerged to save us from the tribalisms of the past has created a new tribe, and this ostensibly uniworld rationality has materialized a new kind of terror. This is the problem secularism, a world without religion, poses. When we forget religion, will we lose our souls? When you watch the videos, you’ll look upon a pseudo-congregation of activists chanting, wailing, gnashing their teeth. They’re like a priestly class exorcising the world of evil.[10] But these priests are of a different order for they haven’t read their Bibles. They don’t understand that just because they believe in God doesn’t mean they’re not demons.[11]

On the Worlds of Science and Religion

There is a distinction to be made between the domain in which science works and articulates the world, in which abstract thinking has its efficacy, and the domain in which religion[13] works and articulates the world and mythology has its efficacy. Jordan B. Peterson makes it this way: Science resides in the world of objects, where things that occupy space and time, distinct among each other, establish the domain of the world. Objects occupying space and time are the constitutive reality. Religion operates in the world as the domain of action, the realm of being (not objects), where the most fundamental reality is suffering. The two have different logics, different conceptions of reality, and different ways of interacting with the phenomena they encounter. The problems of science, establishing cause and effect relationships, are not the problems of religion, where the question of perennial importance is the question of what we do with suffering.[14] Whereas theories of science tell us how we’ve gotten here, the culmination of religious teaching seems to be something like this: being (or existence) can be declared good despite suffering. Religious beliefs tell us what we might do to navigate the chaos of the unknown when it manifests itself in forms of suffering or disillusionment. The world of science gives us data; the world of religion gives us meaning. These two categorically distinct ways of living and viewing the world—the scientific and the religious—exist at this point in history in an enigmatic union.

The social science political ideologies are about the closest thing to religion without religion, because they do offer some sort of account for navigating the world as a forum for action where suffering is a fundamental reality. These accounts are altogether insufficient nevertheless because they do not have a theory of good and evil reckoning with the complexity of individuality. They declare evil is a social phenomena and simply the result of propaganda. Change the propaganda and change the world: the mind of the individual is a vessel waiting to be filled.[15] Evil, for political ideologies, is manifest as the opposition, as the opposing group.[16] This appears to explain why postmodernists have an antipathy toward discussing ideas with people they disagree with. You might hear things like, “If they can’t recognize that is racist, I can’t help them.” Evil, both in its origin and manifestation, is entirely a social phenomenon.

What do we lose if we lose religion? We lose one of its fundamental insights: evil doesn’t derive from the public realm, it is only manifested there, and the line between good and evil runs down the middle of every soul. In Christianity this is the teaching of original sin. We’re not entirely rational. This claim is why religion settled the question of whether establishing the perfect state order would bring about the good life for everyone by ultimately deferring the question to the individual. This is the victory of grace over law in the New Testament. A perfect world order won’t heal the blind man, no love or hope or law, but faith will.

And yet another insight dissipates. Kierkegaard prophesied that our present age is one of “leveling,” where the disparities between things and people are not resolved within their relations to each other, and personal, intimate relations are replaced by relations of abstraction. Everything is held as it is, by their appearances, in abstractions: this is the way one should relate to the world and others. We no longer relate to each other as persons, but as white or black, male or female, Jew or Gentile, oppressor or oppressed. The hero of the religious is nearly extinct, the one who, by an inner peace and satisfaction before God, has gained the knowledge of his or herself and attempts to be ruler over carnal desires and passions instead of others, and, with all mustered vitality, embodies the truths discovered within the personal struggle to overcome suffering into the events of the world. The hero of today, when attaining the social aims the monstrous “public”[12] sets before him or her, is to become so educated, to become so consistent in abstracting, that the he or she is flattened to the level of the crowd in complete, brazen equality. To be a hero today is to remain completely within the definitions of a particular group, to have the same history, the same sufferings, the same enemies, and the same thoughts. Another insight of religion that disappears by the leveling of nihilism is the idea that the constitution of the self is not entirely social, but at least partly subjective, and there are things that can constitute the self that are not retrievable in public, and may never be brought to the gradations of abstraction. The religious insight instructs us that the ability to lead a rich inward life requires taking on the sufferings you’ve experienced and declare victory by the way you live. Nobody can achieve this victory for you. And if the battle against inner demons isn’t fought, history has shown us we project these demons to the outside world, onto others.

Religion tells us evil dwells in the self. It gives us the diametrical separation between the public and private sphere, and in so doing creates an infinitely complex notion of the individual. It tells us there are experiences and choices nobody can touch, that nobody can experience or decide about, except for the individual. This is part of the import of religious expressions such as “hearing God,” “feeling the love of God,” “knowing the will of God,” and the like. For thinkers like Kierkegaard, the movement of faith is entirely individualistic. Secularism, as it’s grounded in empiricism and atheism, forgets this distinction, though not necessarily. The residue of religion is rotting in the carcass of culture, and its remnants, ruined as they might appear, still provide some sustenance to our values for the time being. Empiricism and atheism themselves have been grounded historically in religious values (like the immutable value of the self, free will, moral demands on the self, among others).[17] Only in the void religion leaves behind, which grows by the day, can secularism be possessed by something like the political ideology I am discussing here. And it’s characteristic of our age to, in our forgetting of the religious distinction between self and society, argue that feelings are as valid and public as rational arguments. The mere voicing that one feels oppressed has displaced the requirement for the provision of evidence.

Who’s in Charge?

An old expression that both the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the psychologist Carl Jung used helps us understand the loss of religion more precisely: We don’t think thoughts, rather, thoughts have us, they occur to us. The average person has as much power over what kind of thoughts occur to them as they have the power to summon dreams and determine what happens in them. They are, “Historical and linguistic inevitabilities.”[18] This is a terrifying thought. From Freud onward, it has become clear: pictures and images are something like a precursor to abstract thought. Before humankind could objectify its emotional experiences, it had to project these emotions onto the world. Thus it discovered gods. For much of history gods abstractly symbolized the emotions and values of cultures. The historian of religions Mircea Eliade points out that, as disparate societies met and integrated with one another, over a few decades, a battle of the gods would appear in their mythology. This, of course, on an abstract level, is a merging of values between two societies, something like democratic dialogue before we had the concept of democratic dialogue. So it would happen that the victorious deity would not be one god from one culture, but a combination of gods from both cultures.

As may be clear from the rise and fall of communism in the Soviet Union, and the failure of propaganda to change the basic desires of persons involved in the revolution and the leadership that governed it, it’s not self-evident that, if given the chance, our good intentions to diminish suffering in the world won’t lead to an innocent and accidental opening of the Pandora’s box. As Jung has pointed out, humans are more than rational creatures, and, in fact, our minds might be more accurately construed as a dim candle of reason surrounded by whirlwinds of collective unconscious motivation, perpetually under the threat of eradication by primal forces it can neither articulate nor control. Instead of losing religion to the ether of thoughtlessness, by equivocating religion with fundamentalism (a form of nihilism itself), it might be in our best interest to first understand it and explore whether it has chained up or transformed indomitable beasts not unleashed in the world since the chaos that gave rise to culture.

Religion has given us images to reconcile, especially in the concept of God,[19] our unconscious motivations with our tragically limited abstract understanding of ourselves, others, and the world. Secularism doesn’t appear to be in possession of a functionally equivalent concept to the religious concept of God, and this may spell our doom if we don’t understand the import of the religious concept in the first place. We may be blindly walking into battle with omnipotent dragons, armed with swords of straw. What if religion saves us from ourselves? What if the hundreds of thousands of years humanity survived by telling religious stories is actually the Darwinian solution to the problem of the reconciliation of the collective unconscious to the conscious mind and the solution to the problem of suffering?[20]

I hear often from people who think it’s immoral to have children, that humankind is like a cancer on the world. Jordan B. Peterson reminds us that we better be careful which metaphors we use when we’re talking about ourselves and the world, because it’s not obvious whether we’re in control of them or they control us. If we lose religion then we lose the symbolic grounding for our understandings of ourselves, and the conceptions we’ve inherited from religious traditions will float in the air, without the unifying power of mythical symbols and narrative to unite them with our experiences of suffering. Ironically, as we are seeing now, the movements of religion will appear again, but in a much less sophisticated form. Instead of projecting the unspeakable phenomena of suffering from the collective unconscious onto the gods, we will do so on to other people. To harken to a quote from the television series Fargo, just because dragons aren’t on the map anymore doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

We have seen the power of the collective unconscious in the ideological possession that has become common among the most irreligious section of the population: young people.[21] “We’ve done away with stories of hell so we had to make one on Earth.”[22] It is even suggested by the philosopher Hannah Arendt that our capacity to do evil is limited only to the extent that we think, the ability which makes us individuals. From times long before antiquity, thinking was the meaning and consequence of the divine spark that created the individual in a strike of lightning.[23] Controversially, when Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil,” reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann and his use of cliches, bureaucratic language, and stock phrases in defense of himself, it was this inability which gave rise to the banality, the effect of leveling, the movement of nihilism. “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?”[24] Eichmann’s identity had been swallowed up by propaganda and he had become a mere member of a group. We’re children of history, and we’re not so mature as to have outgrown the collective memories and powers that gave rise to the dark period of WWII.

The sea of secularism hasn’t yet swallowed the world. We still have a somewhat functional concept of God, though the functionality seems to be diminishing by the day. Jung pointed out the concept signified the process of individuation, the process by which individuality is formed. This idea is worth thinking about, should we think about nothing else relating to religion. We may have all the abstract and technological prowess in the universe, but if we lack soul, we’ll lose the spark of divinity, and perhaps ourselves. Religious conceptions just might be the key to resolving the disparities between groups and individuals while safeguarding the distinction between the two.

Endnotes

[1] I want to be clear that I am not talking about feminism in general, or the Black Lives Matter movement in general, or even progressive initiatives in general. I consider myself an adherent to classical liberalism in many ways. I am in fact on the left, and I am pointing out a blind spot to many who I work and agree with on many issues. I am speaking here of a very specific movement that claims the same ends as these just causes-the end of misogyny, racism, sexism, homophobia, inequality, and the like. The movement I am critiquing takes the form of the blind power of herd mentality and the renunciation of reason as the grounds for the general improvement of unjust conditions. Two very specific motives undergird this movement: (1) instead of eliminating inequality by removing obstacles to success people encounter because of their sex, gender, or race, they intend to place obstacles in front of the “privileged,” and, in an ironic bait-and-switch, privilege historically disadvantaged groups; and (2) instead of aiming at equality of opportunity, this movement aims at equality of outcome.

Please see the YouTube links above to witness the kind of groups I am speaking of here.

And see these recent criticisms of identity politics for more perspective:

[2] Jean-Jacques Rousseau distinguished between “good” and “virtuous” in his Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and it’s worth noting here: he thinks humankind exists in a natural state of good, which means that we initially have no desire to harm one another. To be good is to do nothing to anyone, to remain in this “natural state.” But a virtuous person must earn virtue, for it implies a conscious good-will toward others, which is only possible once social relations, language, rationality, and morality have developed. I wonder whether the many who fold-over to the “good intentions” of the postmodernists haven’t yet considered benevolent intentions often are not aligned with benevolent outcomes, and it takes a bit of calculation and compromise, a bit of other-orientation, to conceive of a way of relating to others which isn’t constituted by a master/slave relationship, where one group is always the tyrant and the other the slave.

[3] By “religion,” I will be referring to the fundamental conception of the world that is “religious,” and I take as my starting point that each religious tradition is a response to this (namely, the world as constituted by the reality of suffering). My intellectual leanings are with the Christian tradition, however, and you will see the specifically Christian contributions painted in the broad strokes of “religion.” I use the word “religion” instead of “Christianity” because I want to refer to the conception of the world that is specifically religious, albeit instantiated in this article as Christian insights.

[8] “What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?”

[11] This is the point of James 2.19: “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.” (NIV). Believing in a single good that solves the problem of suffering (like, for instance, the elimination of economic classes), is the attempt of secular society to establish something like a functionally equivalent concept to the concept of God. But it is not functionally equivalent because it misses another key insight of religion: sometimes you do everything right and you suffer anyway. Suffering is a basic element of life. Just because we aim at the good does not mean we won’t bring Hell on Earth in our attempts to attain it.

[12] “…the public is a monstrous nonentity….Only when there is no strong communal life to give substance to the concretion [of individuality] will the press create the abstraction ‘the public,’ made up of unsubstantial individuals who are never united or never can be united in the simultaneity of any situation or organization and yet are claimed to be a whole.” Kierkegaard, “On the Present Age.”

[13] By religion I don’t merely mean what is referred to by “organized religion,” in today’s parlance. I am referring to the totality of the religious sphere: the myths, the experiences of the divine, and the social organizations

.

[14] See Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, and, of course, Jordan B. Peterson’s work.

[15] I refer you here to The Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx.

[16] George Orwell implored the social party to organize themselves under the labels of “oppressed” and the opposition as ”oppressors” in The Road to Wigan Pier.

[17] A glance at the history of ideas proves this true, and because suffering is what essentially establishes subjectivity (we hear this in the popular psychoanalysts today), it’s not a surprise religion posits the notion of the individual. Most notable see Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, or the more recent work of Nick Spencer in The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values.

[20] “How is it that complex and admirable ancient civilizations could have developed and flourished, initially, if they were predicated upon nonsense? (If a culture survives, and grows, does that not indicate in some profound way that the ideas it is based upon are valid? If myths are mere superstitious proto-theories, why did they work? Why were they remembered?….)

Is it not more likely that we just do not know how it could be that traditional notions are right, given their appearance of extreme rationality?

Is it not likely that this indicates modern philosophical ignorance, rather than ancestral philosophical error?

We have made the great mistake of assuming that the ‘world of spirit’ described by those who preceded us was the modern ‘world of matter,’ primitively conceptualized.”

The main project Tylor has been working on is formulating an account of meaning that takes into account Heidegger‘s existentialism, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, Brandom‘s pragmatism, and Jung’s psychology.

“The strange thing about Dillahunty’s reflections is that he’s actually much closer to Peterson than would have appeared in Pangburn’s video. As I have written, Peterson thinks religion has evolved by Darwinian mechanisms, religious myths provide for us the grammar of stories, and, because they rely on competence hierarchies, these stories set the background evolutionary setting to which we’ve adapted as a species, and the conceptual grounds from which our concepts of the individual derived. There is nothing supernaturalist about this position and, in fact, it’s a denial of special revelation, miracles, and divine inspiration altogether, at least, if these concepts are employed at all, they’re stripped of their traditional content.”

“I think the secular humanist movement would be better off, especially in its relation to religious people and its understanding of religion and religious belief, if it sidestepped the question of the existence of God and asked what it means to say that God exists and what it means to believe or have faith in God. It seems to me that this change of emphasis must be granted purely out of the principles of charity and skepticism; the principle of charity because to arrive at a position about religion and religious belief, we have to engage with the best religious thinkers who do ask these questions; and from the principles of skepticism because we have to be skeptical of our own assumptions and ideas about what religion and religious belief are.”

“As social media continues to shape our discourses by selecting for epigrams over nuanced discussion, Bradbury asks us if we will become like Mildred, whose words are like those “heard once in a nursery at a friend’s house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air,” or whether we will become like the talking, depthless faces of anchors operating distraction machines like Fox News or CNN: “the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.” May we find the words that wrestle and struggle with the challenges of life, without strangling or flattening them, and, consequently, diminishing the possibility for genuine human flourishing.”

“As a thinker, he sits firmly within the philosophical traditions spurred by Nietzsche, William James, and Jung. And as an influence, he’s a cultural force that we will not soon forget. Why tell the truth in our age of group-think and Twitter epigrams? Well, it’s our only hope for survival, and the only way for the hero, who speaks a freeing word that organizes chaos into novel order, to emerge.”

The difference between Dennett and Harris is not only in the frameworks from which they analyze the problem of free will, but in the consequences that follow from their methods of analysis. To accept both projects as legitimate, which I think we should, would mean that we should work both to be linguistic innovators and also social revolutionaries. We should be attentive to the ways in which language shapes thought but also be open to using the tools of science to move beyond mere argumentation and hermeneutical innovation to improve society.